September 21, 2004

Stress for Russian tennis players' names

All through the television coverage of US Open tennis
tournament this year, the names of many of the Russian women
tennis players were pronounced incorrectly. I recently
hunted around on the Internet for anything I could find about it, and found
this
article by Neil Schmidt in the Cincinnati Enquirer (August 18).
The article includes a pronunciation guide, which is taken directly from the WTA's own pronunciation guide.

Amazingly, more than half the
names are listed with the stress on the wrong syllable. Below
is a list along with corrections provided by my husband
Vladimir Borschev (Vlah-DEE-mir Bar-SHOFE), who is Russian and
who watches tennis on Russian TV, where the players names are
pronounced by Russian sports announcers (and by the players
themselves in interviews). Most of the names would be clear to
any Russian speaker anyway, although sometimes the stress is
unpredictable.

Player Pronunciation

Name

WTA Guide (from Schmidt's article)

Comments

3. Anastasia Myskina

Miss-KEE-nah

NO: MYSS-kee-nah

(English speakers are unlikely to be able to distinguish the
vowel traditionally transliterated as [Y], so it would probably be
acceptable to represent it as "MISS-kee-nah".)

6. Elena Dementieva

De-MENT-ye-vuh

OK

(My husband writes "De-MENT'-ye-vah", but again
English speakers are unlikely to be able to distinguish
distinguish the ordinary consonant [t] from the palatalized [t]. )

8. Maria Sharapova

Sha-ra-POH-vuh

NO: Sha-RAH-pa-vuh

9. Vera Zvonareva

Zvon-a-RAY-vuh

NO: Zvah-na-RYO-vah

(If it's easier, it would be OK to write it as "Zvon-a-RYO-vuh"
or even "Zvon-ar-YO-vuh". This is the Russian ë, pronounced "YO" and
always stressed. But written Russians usually omit umlauts, so non-Russians
often aren't sure whether it's "YE" (stressed or unstressed) or "YO". By the
way, if there hadn't been the umlaut, it would have been Zvahn-a-RYEH-vuh,
not Zvon-a-RAY-vuh.)

10. Svetlana Kuznetsova

Kooz-NET-so-vuh

NO: Kooz-ne-TSO-vuh or Kooz-net-SO-vuh

14. Nadia Petrova

Pe-TROH-vuh

OK

(My husband writes "Pet-RO-vah", but American announcers
are not going to distinguish exactly where the syllable break comes
anyway.)

25. Elena Bovina

Bo-VEE-nah

NO: BO-vee-nah or BO-vee-nuh

(I wonder why they wrote 'vah' rather than 'vuh' this time for
the last syllable. These unstressed final "a"s are all the same, namely schwa,
and "uh" is a good way to represent it in English.)

26. Elena Likhovtseva

Lee-HOFF-she-vuh

NO: LEE-hof-tse-vuh

(All of the last three syllables are unaccented.
The "tse" gets a slight secondary stress, but the only real
accent is on the first syllable.)

41. Dinara Safina

Sa-FEE-nah

NO: SAH-fee-nuh

71. Alina Jidkova

YID-ko-vuh

NO: Yid-KOH-vuh

It's remarkable -- 8 out of 10 are seriously wrong. 7 of the
10 in the list are given with the accent on the wrong
syllable, and an eighth one (Zvonareva) had the stressed vowel
wrong in an important way. (The two that were correct are
Dementieva and Petrova.) I know from studying Russian that
pronouncing Russian names is not easy! But if someone was going
to make up a pronunciation guide, shouldn't they have checked
more carefully before telling everyone "here's the right way"?

Correspondence with Neil Schmidt, the author of the Cincinnati Enquirer (who has, however, since left that paper), provided some clues. Schmidt reported to me that the WTA stands by its pronunciation guide. Its spokesperson suggested to him that many players might adopt Americanized pronunciations when they speak with foreign reporters. "Supposedly," Schmidt wrote to me, "the WTA Tour lists its pronunciations by what the players themselves submit".